Tweets are about to get twice as long for everyone as Twitter says it is now expanding its new 280-character limit to all users.

The tech company said the new limit will begin its global rollout Tuesday, with each user of the social platform finally receiving the bump up from 140 characters in a matter of days.

Twitter has been testing the longer 280-character limit with a select group of users since September, despite some backlash on the site from some people saying it will clutter the service and reduce the emphasis on brevity.

How do you know whether you have 280 characters on Twitter now? Aside from the obvious test of typing longer tweets, there is now a progress circle the slowly fills up in bottom-right corner of the web interface's text box. pic.twitter.com/UxfqkCqyGf

The San Francisco-based company said it feels confident in the decision for the policy change based on the data from its testing phase.

“In our testing, 280 characters did have a positive impact on the amount of Likes, Retweets and mentions earned,” said Leanne Gibson, acting managing director of Twitter Canada in a statement to the Post.

“While we’re not fundamentally changing Twitter in terms of speed and brevity, we strongly feel that our product update will provide more possibility and a better Twitter experience for all users across Canada.”

Previously nine per cent of English tweets hit the old limit, which translates to a lot of wasted time spent editing or abandoning posts due to the challenge of fitting thoughts into 140-characters, the company said in a blog post. With the new 280-character limit, that number has dropped to one per cent.

Like many of its users, Twitter said it was concerned that timelines would fill up with too many 280-character-long tweets, but data from its tests showed just five per cent of tweets were longer than the old 140 characters and 2 per cent were longer than 190 characters.

“Your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline,” the company said in its blog post. “For reference, in the timeline, Tweets with an image or poll usually take up more space than a 190 character Tweet.”

People with longer character limits tended to have more Likes, Retweets and Mentions as well as more followers, the company added. Users that had a higher character limit also felt more satisfied with how they could express themselves on the site.

“Of interest to Canadians and local partners who use Twitter regularly is that we did see an increase in engagement and time spent by people who had the 280 character option,” Gibson said.

The change to a 280-character policy for tweets follows years of Twitter mulling over the decision to expand the limit, even going as far as testing up to 10,000 characters according to sources that spoke with popular tech blog The Verge.

Meanwhile many users have been publicly begging Twitter executives for years to add the option to edit tweets. “We’re thinking a lot about it,” chief executive Jack Dorsey finally responded in a tweet back in December 2016.

Tuesday’s new 280-character limit for all is a significant policy change and it will be interesting to see how the expansion changes user behaviour, despite Twitter’s assurance it won’t be negative.

“We are making this change after listening and observing a problem our global community was having (it wasn’t easy enough to Tweet!), studying data to understand how we could improve, trying it out, and listening to your feedback,” the company said in its blog post.

“We’ll continue listening and work to make Twitter easier for everyone, while making sure we keep what you love.”

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